We present the implementation of a fragment-based, quantum-centric supercomputing workflow for computing molecular electronic structure using quantum hardware. The workflow is applied to predict the relative energies of two conformers of the 303-atom Trp-cage miniprotein. The methodology employs wave function-based embedding (EWF) as the underlying fragmentation framework, in which all atoms in the system are explicitly included in the configuration interaction (CI) simulations. We employ sample-based quantum diagonalization (SQD) solver for challenging fragments and full configuration interaction (FCI) solver for trivial fragments. The EWF-(FCI,SQD) results are compared against EWF-MP2 and EWF-CCSD benchmarks. The impact of fragmentation on the predicted relative energies of the Trp-cage conformers is further evaluated by comparison with unfragmented RI-MP2 and DLPNO-CCSD calculations. The results demonstrate that large-scale electronic configuration interaction (CI) simulations of protein systems containing hundreds or even thousands of atoms can be realized through the combined use of quantum and classical computing resources.
We present the implementation of a fragment-based, quantum-centric supercomputing workflow for computing molecular electronic structure using quantum hardware. The workflow is applied to predict the relative energies of two conformers of the 303-atom Trp-cage miniprotein. The methodology employs wave function-based embedding (EWF) as the underlying fragmentation framework, in which all atoms in the system are explicitly included in the configuration interaction (CI) simulations. We employ sample-based quantum diagonalization (SQD) solver for challenging fragments and full configuration interaction (FCI) solver for trivial fragments. The EWF-(FCI,SQD) results are compared against EWF-MP2 and EWF-CCSD benchmarks. The impact of fragmentation on the predicted relative energies of the Trp-cage conformers is further evaluated by comparison with unfragmented RI-MP2 and DLPNO-CCSD calculations. The results demonstrate that large-scale electronic configuration interaction (CI) simulations of protein systems containing hundreds or even thousands of atoms can be realized through the combined use of quantum and classical computing resources.
This work presents the implementation of a fragment-based, quantum-centric supercomputing workflow for computing molecular electronic structure using quantum hardware. The workflow is applied to predict the relative energies of two conformers of the 300-atom Trp-cage miniprotein. The methodology employs wave function-based embedding (EWF) as the underlying fragmentation framework, in which all atoms in the system are explicitly included in the CI treatment. CI calculations for individual fragments are performed using either sample-based quantum diagonalization (SQD) for challenging fragments or full configuration interaction (FCI) for trivial fragments. To assess the accuracy of SQD for fragment CI calculations, EWF-(FCI,SQD) results are compared against EWF-MP2 and EWF-CCSD benchmarks. Overall, the results demonstrate that large-scale electronic configuration interaction (CI) simulations of protein systems containing hundreds or even thousands of atoms can be realized through the combined use of quantum and classical computing resources.
We develop a workflow decomposing a molecule into fragments via quantum embedding and simulating them with a heterogeneous quantum-classical (HQC) method. We sample fragment electronic configurations on two 156-qubit quantum processors (ibm_cleveland, ibm_kobe), using up to 94 qubits, running 21,006 circuits for over 239 hours, collecting 3.0⋅109 measurement outcomes -- the most resource-intensive HQC computation for quantum chemistry to date. We compute fragment wavefunctions via optimized subspace diagonalization on supercomputers Fugaku, Miyabi-G, and ROQUO, achieving 72.5% parallel efficiency with scalable distributed linear algebra kernels. We simulate two protein-ligand complexes spanning dispersion- and electrostatics-dominated regimes (11,608, 12,635 atoms), demonstrate >40× increase in system size and up to 210× improvement in accuracy over previous state-of-the-art, with HQC matching coupled-cluster (CCSD) accuracy in fragment energies. We present the first HQC protein-ligand binding prediction using a mixed-basis set and an automated end-to-end workflow enabling practical HQC calculations of large protein systems.
The accurate treatment of electron correlation in extended molecular systems remains computationally challenging using classical electronic structure methods. Hybrid quantum-classical algorithms offer a potential route to overcome these limitations; however, their practical deployment on existing quantum computers requires strategies that both reduce problem size and mitigate hardware noise. In this work, we investigate ground-state energy calculations of ligand-like molecules using Sample-based Quantum Diagonalization (SQD) within the Density Matrix Embedding Theory (DMET) framework, focusing on low-symmetry systems with diverse bonding motifs that exhibit subsystem-dependent variations in fragment-environment entanglement. These entanglement-based variations directly influence bath orbital construction, impurity sizes, and the structure of the embedded Hamiltonians, posing nontrivial challenges for both embedding and quantum sampling. By combining DMET fragmentation with SQD-based construction of reduced configuration spaces through quantum sampling and iterative configuration recovery, we perform quantum simulations on IBM's Eagle R3 (IBM Sherbrooke) and IBM's Heron R3 (IBM Boston) superconducting quantum hardware thereby, showing that the entanglement structure across embedding subsystems plays a central role in determining the efficiency and accuracy of the simulations. Despite these complexities, we show that the DMET-SQD framework yields ground-state energies in strong agreement with DMET-FCI benchmarks, achieving chemical accuracy (1 kcal/mol) across all systems studied. These results demonstrate that SQD-based quantum simulations can be robustly extended to low-symmetry, chemically realistic, industry relevant molecules, and highlight the importance of entanglement-aware embedding strategies for scalable quantum electronic structure calculations.
Quantum-centric supercomputing (QCSC) approaches, such as sample-based quantum diagonalization (SQD), combine quantum processors with high-performance computers (HPC), offering a promising route toward solving challenging electronic structure problems. However, implementation of QCSC approaches to large active space calculations is constrained by the associated number of qubits, deep quantum circuits, sampling cost, and large-scale Hamiltonian diagonalization. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a distributed QCSC framework that decomposes complex molecular problems into parallel sub-problems requiring fewer qubits, shallower circuits, and reduced shot budgets. A physically motivated, two-step aggregation scheme then reconstructs the global solution: first, a computational bit assignment strategy optimizes a cost function to appropriately map local bit indices to global ones, yielding a mapped tensor product state (MTPS); second, an inter-fragment correlation recovery module restores missing cross-fragment interactions. Herein, we employ a multi-layered generative machine learning architecture, starting with utilizing the recently proposed physics-informed generative SQD (PIGen-SQD) as a distributed QCSC solver, followed by a secondary generative module to model configuration distributions and identify dominant sectors of the global Hilbert space. For water and formamide dimers, our method achieves up to 95% reduction in the diagonalization dimension while enhancing energy accuracy by an order of magnitude over conventional SQD. Furthermore, application to the water hexamer ((H2O)6) cage successfully decomposes a 120-qubit problem into six 20-qubit monomeric subsystems, and stitches the monomers under a dimeric approximation, demonstrating excellent agreement with the reference classical methods.
We analyzed the performance of quantum algorithms for studying protein-ligand systems, using both simulator and real hardware. To achieve this, we selected thrombin and 5 ligands as a test case and employed a decomposition strategy using density matrix embedded theory, dividing the ligand systems into three fragments each. First, the energy of one of the fragments was calculated using the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) using a state vector simulator, while the energy of the remaining fragments was calculated using Couple Cluster Singles and Doubles (CCSD), with the protein treated as point charges located at the respective atomic sites. Through these noiseless simulations, we evaluated the results under ideal conditions using the state-of-the-art Unitary CCSD ansatz to validate the efficacy of the strategy in a controlled setting without quantum noise. Subsequently, we evaluated the impact of approximations in the ansatz, optimizer, and active space size, which are necessary to decrease the computational cost, in order to target real hardware during the current Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum era. Finally, we performed the VQE calculations using a superconducting quantum computer developed by the RIKEN RQC-Fujitsu Collaboration Center and also analyzed the noise effect through simulations. The results demonstrated that the use of quantum algorithms can enhance the binding energy correlation value, offering potential applications in the workflow of computer-aided drug design.
Computing ground-state properties of molecules is a promising application for quantum computers operating in concert with classical high-performance computing resources. Quantum embedding methods are a family of algorithms particularly suited to these computational platforms: they combine high-level calculations on active regions of a molecule with low-level calculations on the surrounding environment, thereby avoiding expensive high-level full-molecule calculations and allowing the distribution of computational cost across multiple and heterogeneous computing units. Here, we present the first density matrix embedding theory (DMET) simulations performed in combination with a sample-based quantum diagonalization (SQD) method. We employ the DMET-SQD formalism to compute the ground-state energy of a ring of 18 hydrogen atoms and the relative energies of the chair, half-chair, twist-boat, and boat conformers of cyclohexane. The full-molecule 41- and 89-qubit simulations are decomposed into 27- and 32-qubit active-region simulations, which we carry out on the ibm_cleveland device, obtaining results in agreement with reference classical methods. Our DMET-SQD calculations mark tangible progress in the size of active regions that can be accurately tackled by near-term quantum computers and are an early demonstration of the potential for quantum-centric simulations to accurately treat the electronic structure of large molecules, with the ultimate goal of tackling systems such as peptides and proteins.